Featured photos

Canada got the last hurrah at the Celebration of Light Saturday evening, closing the three-night event with a winning display. Canada was declared the winner of the event, with Brazil and China finishing second and third, respectively.

Chilliwack

Drones

Researchers at the University of the Fraser Valley believe drones may finally silence the cannons that boom throughout the summer on blueberry farms. Professor Tom Baumann and his team are reprogramming...

Top Picks

SPARKLING PLENTY: The garden at the Canuck Place Children’s Hospice looked extra-bright recently. It wasn’t just the oversized sparklers 150 folk waved there. Rather, the Robert L. Conconi Foundation’s Victoria Conconi had pledged to match $200,000 in donations made to Canuck Place’s million-dollar 20th-anniversary campaign by July 31. Addressing the families of 600 youngsters the Vancouver and Abbotsford facilities now serve, founding clinical nurse Brenda Eng said: “Never be afraid to tell your story.” Alysone Martel heeded that when speaking of son Griffin, 12, being a patient since age 18 months. Although care there is primarily palliative, Alysone smilingly said: “We may graduate.” She meant that Griffin could leave, alive, at Canuck Place’s mandatory age 19, when some of his contemporaries will begin earning seven-figure salaries from its namesake hockey club.

Neighbours of a downtown Chilliwack house notorious for drug and prostitution activity finally breathed a sigh of relief Wednesday as RCMP officers raided the home, arrested 10 people and kicked out many more.

Two years ago, Emily Janzen belted out Nat King Cole’s Orange Colored Sky backed by her high school jazz band with all the confidence and personality of a young woman determined to see her name in lights one day.

The District of Kent says it is putting on hold a controversial plan to excavate within Mountain Slough — a hot spot for endangered species in the Fraser Valley. The excavation is intended to reduce flood risk for local farmers.

As many as 18,000 chickens and turkeys are either dead or will be destroyed after avian flu was found at two Fraser Valley farms, the same number that were culled from a single farm in Abbotsford during the early stages of a devastating outbreak in 2004.In that outbreak — B.C.’s worst — the virus eventually spread to 42 farms and led to the culling of 17 million birds.But industry experts are confident that measures introduced during the past decade will contain the latest outbreak at a turkey farm in Abbotsford and a broiler breeder farm in Chilliwack, and prevent widespread infection.

VICTORIA — When Ombudsman Jay Chalke was handed the job of investigating those botched firings in the health ministry this week, he offered multiple assurances to the public that his office would do its best to get to the bottom of the murky affair. “I am committed to a diligent and professional investigation into this matter,” he vowed in a statement issued by his office after a legislature committee referred the matter to him.